BG Reads 7.17.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - July 17, 2024

July 17, 2024

Bingham Group Reads

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www.binghamgp.com

July 17, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 ATCEMS officials, union leaders share what the millions in Austin's proposed budget will do for them (KVUE)

🟣 Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman among 2 finalists for Austin chief job (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

🟣 Meet the man playing a key role in training Austin's workforce (Austin Business Journal)

Read On!

[BINGHAM GROUP]

🟣 Bingham Group has renewed its MBE and DBE certifications with the city of Austin. We are currently seeking sub-consultant services to support projects in the Austin Metro. Learn more here.

🟣 BG Podcast Episode 260 // Our wrap up the week of July 8, 2024 in Austin politics, and discussion of the week ahead.

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

🟣 The Austin City Council meets tomorrow at 10AM for its Regular Meeting

🟣 Last Friday Friday, City Manager T.C. Broadnax presented the city’s proposed $5.9 billion FY 24/25 to the Austin Council.

[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

ATCEMS officials, union leaders share what the millions in Austin's proposed budget will do for them (KVUE)

City of Austin leaders have less than a month to hammer out a new budget. As part of the plan, they're considering pumping millions of more dollars into EMS.

Austin-Travis County EMS is potentially set to receive an extra $12 million.

"We are the largest municipal third service EMS in the country," said Robert Luckritz, the chief for ATCEMS.

Luckritz said this money is needed and will help add more critical team members like those in the Collaborative Care Center. That's a group of trained professionals that can help triage incidents better and not necessarily send off ambulances for every call.

"Ambulances go to life-threatening emergencies. And let's find problem-solvers like community health paramedics, physician assistants, other individuals that can, you know, telehealth that can solve some of these problems, without taking someone to the hospital," said Luckritz.

Currently, ambulances are already stretched thin, according to Austin EMS Association President Selena Xie… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman among 2 finalists for Austin chief job (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman was named a finalist to be the next chief in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, as his department continues to play a key role in securing the Republican National Convention this week.

Norman is one of two finalists. The other is Lisa Davis, an assistant chief for the Cincinnati Police Department. If Norman is offered the job and accepts, it would end a nearly three-decade career in Milwaukee.

Norman has largely avoided addressing his interest in the Austin position to local media. The Journal Sentinel has twice asked him about it, and each time, Norman told reporters he was focused on preparing for the Republican National Convention.

“I’m dealing with the RNC right now. I’m dealing with the safety of the city. That’s my focus right now," he said on July 9.

In an interview Tuesday, Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said it would be a loss for the city if Norman left his post and added that he has "nothing but respect" for the chief.

"But nothing's set in stone just yet, he is the police chief and will be the police chief, especially right now during this time with the Republican National Convention going on," Johnson said. "And so I'm excited to continue to work with him."

Norman, a Milwaukee native, was hired in 1996 by the Milwaukee police and worked as an officer until 2002 when he was promoted to detective. In 2020, he became assistant chief and later that year was appointed as acting chief, following the retirement of another acting chief and the controversial removal of former chief Alfonso Morales in 2020.

The next year, Norman was named the chief of police for the department after a tumultuous 15-month search for the city. He was the second Black man to be named permanent police chief, after Arthur Jones, who was chief from 1996 to 2003.

Since Norman was hired, he has emphasized community relations and steered the department through the COVID-19 pandemic, when crime spiked in the city and across the country.

He was also tasked with overseeing the department's overhaul of its stop-and-frisk practices, following a 2018 $3.4 million settlement with the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. That lawsuit argued that Black and Latino Milwaukee residents were disproportionately stopped and searched by police, regularly without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Meet the man playing a key role in training Austin's workforce (Austin Business Journal)

The last time Russell Lowery-Hart worked in Austin, it had a population of about 570,000 people — compared to nearly 1 million now.

The year was 1998 and he was wrapping up a teaching job. While the city had its share of tech companies then, it had yet to earn a global reputation as a hotbed of innovation anchored by Tesla Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.

"My first job out of grad school was at (St. Edward's University) in 1996," said Lowery-Hart, who returned to Austin last fall when he took the helm as chancellor of Austin Community College. "And I loved teaching there (and) loved being in Austin."

At the time, however, he and his wife were starting a new family, so he opted to leave St. Ed's after two years and move back to West Texas, where they both are from. That's where he got involved in community colleges, working most recently as president of Amarillo College, and became enamored of their power to help people earn credentials that lead to "family-sustaining" wages at prices they can afford.

"It's the reason, frankly, why I left the university world," Lowery-Hart said.

"When I looked at the economic landscape of Texas and looked at the future of higher education, I felt like community colleges were where innovation was happening and where the workforce, the community and civic government were aligning to reimagine communities. And I wanted to be a part of it."… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Elon Musk announces SpaceX HQ is moving to Texas; X headquarters moving to Austin (Austin American-Statesman)

In true Muskian fashion, personal frustrations over public school policy in California seemingly led Elon Musk to announce Tuesday that he is relocating SpaceX’s and X's headquarters from the Golden State to Texas. 

Elon Musk posted on X, formerly Twitter, that the SAFETY Act signed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom was “the final straw,” causing him to move his Space X company to the Lone Star State. He later posted that X will also relocate its headquarters to Texas.

“Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas,” he posted... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

CenterPoint spent $800M on mobile generators. Where are they post-Hurricane Beryl? (Houston Chronicle)

Over the last three years, CenterPoint Energy – the company in charge of delivering power to millions of customers in the Houston region – has spent $800 million on 20 massive generators. The hefty price tag was controversial at the time, but state regulators approved it because CenterPoint claimed the generators would keep the lights on during an extended power outage. Last week, Hurricane Beryl led to massive outages in and around the nation’s fourth-largest city, leaving more than a million people in the dark for days. So, where were those generators?

It turns out that almost none of them were deployed in the wake of Hurricane Beryl, the Chronicle has found – even as some 90,000 people remained in the dark as of Tuesday afternoon.

That’s partly because even though CenterPoint has referred to the equipment as “mobile generation,” the vast majority of it is not actually that mobile. Fifteen of the generators – each with a capacity of 32 megawatts, big enough to power entire neighborhoods – take several days to assemble and cannot be moved without a special permit, which itself can take days to secure. None of those generators have been put in service since CenterPoint first began renting them in 2021.

Indeed, the company told the Chronicle this week that they are “not for rapid response use” and “are not designed to be ‘mobile’,” even though it has repeatedly described them as “mobile” in news releases, regulatory filings and memos to investors. In Beryl’s wake, CenterPoint has deployed three of its remaining five large generators at a water processing plant and two senior living centers. Each of those is the size of a tractor-trailer and has a capacity of about five megawatts… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

South Texas leaders push to meet with incoming Mexican president over water debt ‘crisis’ (KTSM NBC)

Lawmakers from the Rio Grande Valley are vying to meet with Mexico’s incoming president over water owed to the United States. U.S. Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Texas, this week wrote to Mexican President-Elect Claudia Sheinbaum requesting a meeting to address water deliveries that are owed to the United States under a 1944 international treaty. “The ongoing water scarcity in South Texas represents a true crisis for both communities and farmers,” De La Cruz wrote Monday in the letter.

“Given the dire need for water relief in South Texas, I respectfully request a meeting with you so that we may best work together to resolve this long standing issue.” U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez told Border Report on Friday that he has meetings planned with Sheinbaum “and some incoming members of her cabinet Monday and Tuesday.”

Gonzalez recently told “Inside Valley Politics” that he was meeting with Sheinbaum to discuss water payments and other issues. “I have a meeting with the incoming president Sheinbaum,” Gonzalez said.

“I intend to bring up the issues that I’ve been critical on Mexico, the insecurity along our borders, and in the interior of Mexico. I’m going to bring up the water debt that still hasn’t been paid, and other issues that I think are concerns for us.” Both lawmakers have been outspoken and aggressive in efforts to get Mexico to pay water owed to the United States, and specifically to the Rio Grande, which supplies most of the drinking and agriculture water for South Texas communities.

“Under the 1944 Water Treaty, Mexico pledged to supply the United States with an average 350,000 acre feet of water annually over a five year cycle,” De La Cruz wrote.

“Unfortunately, there have been consistent delays in meeting these obligations which is causing agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley to suffer.” Under the treaty, Mexico is obligated to pay 1.75 million acre-feet of water to the United States via the Rio Grande during a five-year cycle.

The current cycle ends in October 2025 and Mexico has not yet delivered 400,000 acre-feet of water — that’s barely one year’s worth of water owed, according to the U.S. Section of the International Boundary and Water Commission, which oversees the Rio Grande... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

J.D. Vance pick unnerves GOP’s business elite, thrills populists (Washington Post)

Former president Donald Trump’s choice of Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) as the GOP’s vice-presidential nominee reflects the ascendancy of the party’s populist economic wing — and the choice is alarming traditional conservative policymakers and elite donors who opposed the pick. Vance has suggested a break with the Republican Party’s economic orthodoxy of the last several decades on a range of policy issues, including unions, antitrust, trade and taxes, even making comments that appear at odds with Trump, who already scrambled the party’s ideology. The first-term senator has embraced a more active role for government intervention in the economy than most Republicans, emerging as a leader of a minority faction among GOP senators that also includes Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Marco Rubio (Fla.).

Vance has praised President Biden’s antitrust crusader at the Federal Trade Commission, called for a higher minimum wage and even once called for raising taxes on corporations — all positions anathema to conservatives. The departure is particularly stark compared with the vice president of Trump’s first term, Mike Pence, who branded himself as an adherent of Ronald Reagan by embodying GOP orthodoxy on everything from deficits to taxes, or former House speaker Paul D. Ryan, another GOP vice-presidential nominee known for his free-market orthodoxy.

“It’s clear to most leaders of the party that the future will be the Vances, the Hawleys and the Rubios — to have one of them be on the ticket is a very significant marker, or in some ways validation, of the direction the Republican Party is now heading on key economic issues,” said Oren Cass, a Vance ally and president of American Compass, a think tank closely tied to the economic populists in the GOP. “Vance articulates a very clear perspective on the failure of what he’ll call the 'market fundamentalism’ of the GOP — the consensus economic policy of the last few decades.” Vance’s predecessor, former senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio), was also viewed as closely allied with the party’s traditional GOP policymakers.

“The emergence of Trump has caused a populist, aggressive side of the GOP to split off on economics, and Vance is one of the leaders of that populist caucus,” said Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to Portman and is now at the Manhattan Institute, a center-right think tank… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Sen. Bob Menendez guilty of taking bribes in cash and gold and acting as Egypt’s foreign agent (Associated Press)

U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted of all charges Tuesday in a sweeping corruption trial in which he was accused of accepting bribes of gold and cash from three New Jersey businessmen and acting as an agent for the Egyptian government.

A jury in Manhattan deliberated for parts of three days before finding the Democrat guilty of 16 crimes, including bribery, extortion, honest services fraud, obstruction of justice and conspiracy.

Prosecutor said he abused the power of his office to protect allies from criminal investigations and enrich associates, including his wife, through acts that included meeting with Egyptian intelligence officials and softening his position toward that country as he speeded its access to millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

Menendez, 70, looked toward the jury at times and appeared to mark a document in front of him as the verdict was read. Afterward, he sat resting his chin against his closed hands, elbows on the table. He vowed to appeal as he left the courthouse…. (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[2024 Austin City Council Race Watch]

This fall will see elections for the following Council Districts 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, and Mayor.

Declared candidates so far are:

Mayor

District 2

District 4

District 6

District 7 (Open seat)

District 10 (Open seat)

_________________________

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